Science Quotes - Page 165

On a perfect planet such as might be acceptable to a physicist, one might predict that from its origin the diversity of life would grow exponentially until the carrying capacity, however defined, was reached. The fossil record on Earth, however, tells a very different story.

I am tired of all this thing called science here. We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.

In the last analysis the entire field of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.

Science fiction still is an idea genre.

The only people who have the long view are some scientists and some science fiction writers.

[O]ne might ask why, in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, the aliens are so intent on coming to Earth at all. It would be as if every vertebrate in North America somehow felt drawn to a particular house in Peoria, Illinois. Are we really that interesting?

How many discoveries are reserved for the ages to come when our memory shall be no more, for this world of ours contains matter for investigation for all generations.

Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.

There are many things akin to highest deity that are still obscure. Some may be too subtle for our powers of comprehension, others imperceptible to us because such exalted majesty conceals itself in the holiest part of its sanctuary, forbidding access to any power save that of the spirit. How many heavenly bodies revolve unseen by human eye!

Science is a good thing. News reporters are good things too. But it's never a good idea to put them in the same room.

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

Today's water institutions-the policies and laws, government agencies and planning and engineering practices that shape patterns of water use-are steeped in a supply-side management philosophy no longer appropriate to solving today's water problems.

One of the responsibilities faced by the Environmental Genome Project is to provide the science base upon which society can make better informed risk management decisions.

Some persons have contended that mathematics ought to be taught by making the illustrations obvious to the senses. Nothing can be more absurd or injurious: it ought to be our never-ceasing effort to make people think, not feel.

All Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.

Building up arms is not a substitute for diplomacy.

The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the question.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom.

And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

Scientists have been struck by the fact that things that break down virtually never get lost, while things that get lost hardly ever break down.

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.